natural
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: They are humans in the digital world and legendary warriors and one with nature.
1. phoenix (Takuya)

**A/N:** Written for the

Diversity Writing Challenge, g3 – a drabble collection consisting of drabbles of exactly 100 words  
Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Data Forest task - drabble collection focused on a character or group of characters  
The Halloween Drabble Collection Celebration – 45 drabbles, nature theme

* * *

 **natural  
** _1: phoenix_

He's on fire. His flesh should peel and melt off his body like boiled potatoes but it doesn't. Instead, they kiss already sun-kissed skin and leave glistening marks of their conquest of him. Their fingers slither beneath his clothes, skin, muscle and bone and right into his heart where the blood most ferociously boils. And once they're there, they spread into every crevice in soul and body, and he's on fire inside and out and should melt into a puddle or explode into a cloud of gas – but instead he's a phoenix who's reborn and the flames become his sword.


	2. shade (Kouji)

**natural  
** _2: shade_

The shade was cold and eyes lurked there: eyes that threatened to strip him bare if he didn't send little lightning-bolt like glares at them in return. Their fingers were cold and tried to snake around his limbs like coils of puppet-rope and they curled and held him fast even as he struggled in their grip. But at least their grip was weak once he escaped into the light and they knew he was a human plant: he craved the light. Why couldn't the dark embrace him instead: hug him close, shelter him and whisper sweet dreams instead of nightmares?


	3. song (Izumi)

**natural  
** _3: song_

There's no ground under her: just the breeze singing in her ear in a language she knows but can't quite recall. Aren't those voices rusty in her ears that haven't heard those lyrics for so long? She mouths them to herself, soundless because won't it be an insult to tarnish that perfect tune with her own unpractised imperfection? But it's not beyond her and it bursts out all at once: their shared chorus for the song. And they sing in a language whose only chorus she knows but the rest comes: as she listens, as she hears, as she sings…


	4. goosebumps (Tomoki)

**natural  
** _4: goosebumps_

He had goosebumps up his arms but he wasn't cold. He didn't understand why he wasn't cold. It was a warm day outside and the sun smiled and sweat clung to his skin the way sweat clung to those who had comforting rugs of fat to shed. And he did have layers to shed except there were goosebumps up his arms and he needed the gone and layers of warmth would bury better than the sun could reach and burn. The sun was oh so very bright but also far away, and layers he could touch and wrap around himself.


	5. muscle (Junpei)

**natural  
** _5: muscle_

He's got muscles that ache: muscles that he didn't have before and it's an odd feeling. It's a nice feeling because he's got something to work for and he's working for it but it's also not a nice feeling because it stretches and pushes his body and remoulds it like a piece of clay and he's not a piece of clay and he's also not sure how he's going to come out at the end of it. He doesn't want to change but he's changing even though he's not ready for a change. And he's body's off changing despite him.


	6. father's embrace (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _6: father's embrace_

Where was the quiet song – the eternal comfort – in his ears? Soft darkness that brushed his eyelids like mascara. Heavy mascara that covered up those blues and made sure they never heated up, never turned red like a gauge flipped on. Made sure the black never went white like a hot fire, like the sun who looked yellow from down on earth but only because they were so far away. Where was that childish notion that that far away back would turn around and show his face, be the wall that hid him instead of the wall that blocked him.


	7. doused flames (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _7: doused flames_

Water's wet. He remembers the water from the river and how it doused his fire and he remembers being the knight who's a floundering fish and needs to be saved by the princess. But the water's different now: splits on his palms so the fuel burns and the breath sings and he doesn't need to see all the way down to electrons being shot apart by his flame to know he holds his antithesis in the palm of his hands. They're opposites: water and flame but when they come together, they explode and he's wiser now. Wiser and stronger too.


	8. princess (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _8: princess_

He'd been afraid once upon a time. The princess who had his consort and waited for his knight in shining armour to sweep him off his feet, and then he came. A red glowing night with fire fists and golden hair like the sun, until the river doused his flame and he trembled, because who else would be the hero now? But fire wasn't tame. Fire caught and it had lit his heart as well. He was tired of being afraid. And so he broke the water's surface and stood up tall – and then he was tall and blinding white.


	9. yin and yang (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _9: yin and yang_

The light is dazzling at first. Blinding. He can't look away and he can't blink and so he stumbles around in that white space blind. But he gets it, eventually. Realises he'll never see if the light's too bright but he can't see in the black as well and there's a balance somewhere to be found.

He doesn't realise that means there's a twin out there to balance him, but he will. And it's ironic when he does. Ironic and fate and it can't be a coincidence that he's the darkness when he's the light and the scale balances perfectly.


	10. shut inside (Izumi)

**natural**  
 _10: shut inside_

The air had felt stale and stifling before. Stale because she knew she shut herself up in that small room with everybody else outside and listened to the floorboards fibrate as they run around without her and the footfalls tell a tale she can only read but never be a part of – but she could play a minor background role if she chose, if she acted the part but those costumes were suffocating and she'd rather be in this dreary room alone than choked to death on falsehoods…but why wasn't there a place she could be herself: the perfect place?


	11. dancing with lightning (Junpei)

**natural**  
 _11: dancing with lightning_

Lightning dances in his fists and it's hard to imagine that he'd been afraid of that very lightning once when now he's not. They dance between fingers and between tiny little molecules in the air he can only see because the lightning dances between them and the thunder is the percussion notes of a song instead of the thudding of a door that's creaking and about to break and he can enjoy that song now: listen to it without cowering under blankets that might muffle the sound. He can dance under the song: fly in the sky around lightning bolts.


	12. illumination (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _12: illumination_

He used to hate the light. It was so strong it gorged his eyes and made them bleed and blinded him to the soft shadow paintings outside. He used to hate the light because it woke him up from his dreams: dreams where they were a happy family and he couldn't see the lines of tiredness and stress in his mother's eyes or the way she grimaces sometimes with every step, or the grey mottling skin of his grandmother as she slowly became a corpse. But now it illuminates smiles as well: the glow of happiness and love and absolution.


	13. ice-markers (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _13: ice-markers_

Ice is the chill that creeps through his blood and calms him, calms him where fire would blister him from inside out because he's not a source of inexhaustible fuel: he's not a furnace like Takuya or firm stone like his brother. He's ice and ice can be soft or hard, warmed or further cooled. It can slow the world with its touch or speed it up, make them pace, make them run. He can leave a glistening trail of cool water or love-bites warmth will only make flare. He has ice-picks and melts off stones, but leaves lasting marks.


	14. funeral (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _14: funeral_

They said shadows climbed out of the coffin at funerals. His grandmother climbed out of hers: on that bright day where every shadow was in stark contrast with the light, where they curled around his feet as he stood behind his mother, around his hands as he helped pick out the bones. They steadied him then, but afterwards, in the silence before sleep, they clung to him like cobwebs and he couldn't brush them off. They stayed and dug her last words into his skin until he was near-obsessed, because there were no new words to erase or colour them.


	15. oxygen (Izumi)

**natural**  
 _15: oxygen_

Air is everywhere. They breathe it, they crumble in it and isn't that a sad thought, that the oxygen that's unavoidable in their survival is also making them slowly break apart, inside and out. There's science behind it all: science that explains it, necessitates it - but she's not a scientist. She's an adventurer who knows she hangs from a thread, that she's always hung from a thread, and so she'll live each day to the fullest instead of watch herself rot away. She'll drink the oxygen till she's drunk. She'll fly until the sun melts her wings and she falls.


	16. curious kitten (Takuya)

**natural  
** _16: curious kitten_

He was the kind of kid who'd touch the stove even though his mother said not to and wind up burned. he was the kind of kid who'd touch it again a few weeks later, when the blisters have healed up, because the stove's no less interesting than before and he's not satisfied. And, of course, he'd get burned again and the cycle wound rinse and repeat because he was a kitten who was drowning in curiosity and looking for that satisfaction that might save him. But it wasn't satisfaction, in the end, that would be his saviour...but growth.


	17. covalency (Junpei)

**natural  
** _17: covalency_

He's not an unassuming guy after all. Pushes some people away. Attracts others. Put them all together and he's got a collection of friends and enemies; two enemy forces that shove at each other and try to find hand-holds. He hasn't got handholds but he's got the socket ready to fry their nerves or batteries and a charger to rerouse their hearts and minds. He can repel and attract and he's been missing the attraction portion before but now he knows and he's lucky it's been working subconsciously and has gotten him the right Trailmon: the right company and friends.


	18. dark room (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _18: dark room_

He'd keep the lights off because then he didn't have to cast stage-lamps on his dusty corners where a mother would have meticulously cleaned them out and made them shine. He'd keep the curtains drawn because then he didn't have to fight through the glare to get a good look at the picture frame and he couldn't hunt down that subject instead because that subject didn't exist anywhere in the world anymore except in photographs and the sun made it fade and blotted it out. So he tucked away because there wasn't anything in the present he wanted to illuminate.


	19. balanced (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _19: balanced_

Darkness is balanced. He's never realised or really thought about it before, but it goes hand in hand with something else. And maybe that's why the loneliness from before had ached so much. With friends by his side – friends so different from each other they can mix with great variety and without too much overlap – he doesn't feel that aching loneliness anymore. And whatever problem they run into, they solve it together. What one can't do, the other manages. Like how the light can't get through or see through walls. Like how darkness can never get close to the sun.


	20. hellfire (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _20: hellfire_

Fire was the sun, but fire was also the torment of hell and was that the price he had to pay for failing, for failing all of them? The fire couldn't tear through his skin and make him run, but instead it roasted him on a skillet: slowly, painfully, so he hadn't even noticed it all falling apart and clung onto false hope – and something else had burned to ashes in front of his eyes, someone who didn't deserve to be burned to ashes and he was the leader, the first to burn – but he was also flame and last.


	21. fighting (Junpei)

**natural**  
 _21: fighting_

Lightning has a quick temper but it can also aim with pinprick accuracy and lightning never misses twice. And he's not a perfect bolt of lightning yet but he's getting there. He'll get there. He's thunder too and thunder yells its battle cry before the lightning strikes because he's a warrior and he fights with honour and honour is giving them the chance to turn and strike before you strike them down. Lightning is also light when light and fire's not around, and the echo after is the darkness and it's both but none and its own element in one.


	22. tropical storm (Izumi)

**natural**  
 _22: tropical storm_

Wind could be a gentle caress or a destructive hurricane and her hurt and anger amassed into a tropical storm the likes that could blow a tiny Japanese island off the map. Because people had big egos like that: they took up entire islands, entire campsites, entire classrooms. And she could blow all of that away until she wasn't close enough to hear their whispers, and none of them were strong enough to stand against her – or stand _for_ her because wind in good company didn't have to be a storm: they could be two birds dancing in the sky.


	23. fire and ice (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _23: fire and ice_

Fire is supposed to melt ice, but fire also fixes its imperfections. Its hot moulding tongue slips over bumps and makes them smooth, slips over cracks and fills them in and leaves only the most unnoticeable dent behind. It leaves behind a better fitting mould for him and he can snugly slip into it and come out the perfect ice-cube to then turn around and cool down those far too hot drinks for him. It's a mutual relationship and it's not like ice can't freeze fire: it can, if there's a need. They're compliments like with water, wood and air.


	24. limiting definition (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _24: limiting definition_

Even he had his limits when it came to light. Sunrooms were still blinding. The worst of summer still begged for sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat on the beach. He still needed snow=goggles to fight the glare. Sometimes, they forgot that light wasn't necessarily synonymous with the sun and artificial lamps that hung from the ceiling. The former was more fire and the latter lightning and they were both light, but also weren't light. Light wasn't a tangible, well-defined, thing. And its antithesis was just as ill-defined and they muddled, mixed – but still stood in dark contrast to each other.


	25. cigarette smoke (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _25: cigarette smoke_

His heart splutters like a candle that's gone out and needs to be lit again – or maybe it's a cigarette instead, still dripping ash and that acrid smell that makes him cough now that it's in his nose and not down his throat. Wax and ash and that burnt out smell all sting his hands and feet and nose as he tries to strike the match alight again and they choke the fire too, sitting on it like a blanket he has to blow out instead of suck in like the tobacco and failures that settle at his lung bases.


	26. heart in ice (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _26: heart in ice_

Frost was a fist clenched and his heart was its grasp, slowly crushed. Lucky it was built of rubber and that was a surprise because everyone including him thought it was made of glass: the kind of fine glass that could build a mosaic but also shattered far too easily. But rubber didn't shatter. Rubber burned and smelt like torn up tyres that slowly leaked out air and fire or friction or cold ice picks could tear them and make them scream. And fire pokers wouldn't pick them out but rather leave their own holes to bleed from.


	27. raging wind (Izumi)

**natural  
** 27: raging wind

The wind howls in her ears. It's angry and it'd rather the empty crevices of her skull to beat in but the wind's too wild for that. she'll bleed from her ears and nose but it's a weakness when the wind's so wild, so free – she can't punch the walls 'cause they're too far, out of reach. She can thrash in the air but that's not as satisfying: there's no resistance, no opponent – so she flies against the wind instead and becomes her own sparring partner until the wind really is in her skull and her nose and ears bleed.


	28. shadow company (Kouichi)

**natural  
** 28: shadow company

His shadow always kept him company. It was an odd notion but why couldn't the shadow be his friend and guardian then? It saw more than his mother, eyes sunken after long hours at work. It saw more than his grandmother, eyes closed as she hacked up the tar and phlegm that was rooted in her lungs. It followed him through quiet lunchtimes and crowded roads and shops that were one or the other or sometimes both because people didn't mean noise and people didn't mean company either. And maybe that was it. Maybe the shadow wasn't any real company.


	29. over-filtered (Kouji)

**natural  
** 29: over-filtered

He used to be blind as a bat in the dark but he's better now. Less fear and more understanding, perhaps, or maybe it's simply because he's whole now and not being whole before meant he was looking at the world with dysfunctional lenses – or over-abundant filters. Well, those filters are switched off now if that's the case. He's not seeing only half the world in the light and nothing at all in the dark. He's seeing the shadows too, and their intricate paintings on the wall and, most of all, he's seeing the bits of truth he'd missed before.


	30. current world (Junpei)

**natural  
** 30: current world

Charges danced upon an electrical field but he was the pro when it came to plotting a path through that obstacle course. Sure, it could be a convoluted path at times but games were more fun like that and the pursuit got tripped up more like that as well. It was like painting the floor behind them with ice except it wasn't so simple, so open. His traps were hidden: the switches on the floor. His walls were invisible: the currents that danced in the air. There was a whole world model spread out and they'd stumble through it blindly.


	31. snowballs (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _31: snowballs_

He's not much of an ice-skater but he's a snow skier and there are differences between them, big differences, even if they do both fall under ice. The snow is soft and he can make snowmen and snow angels and snow forts and snow balls, but ice is rock solid unless it's melting and then it's not really ice anymore. It's water, or something in between, or maybe the fire's overdone it and it's just water vapour that steams and is lost into the air. But snow melts fast too: it melts when touched, while snowballs fly, while sun shines.


	32. closed box (Izumi)

**natural**  
 _32: closed box_

Wind danced in open space but in a closed room, it hovered uselessly. There were no fans to kick it back into gear. There were no windows to keep her chilled, keep her pacing. They may as well have slapped her in a straight-jacket and tied her to a chair. If they tied her to a ceiling, maybe she could've been the fan instead. If they opened the door, she could dance right out of there. If they knocked a window into the wall, she could pace to her heart's content and not think she was stuck in this box.


	33. lightning speed (Junpei)

**natural**  
 _33: lightning speed_

Lightning is a flash of light in the sky. It's transient. Not a light bulb to hover over heads or stars to pin-point a path to paradise. Lightning can come down from the heavens like its spears, in fact, while the stars fall like a rain shower or shine like glitter in the sky. Lightning can show a preview of what's coming and might get lucky and fry them too, but can also misfire and shoot down hope instead. Too hard sometimes. Too hasty. The speed of light isn't the sun that's always there but the lightning that flashes past.


	34. blinking (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _34: blinking_

He blinked and things were gone. That was how the world went sometimes. How the world worked. He blinked and suddenly he didn't have a mother anymore. He blinked and suddenly the house was different. He blinked and suddenly there was an extra person there, when it was far too late for someone to slot into that empty hole his mother had left behind. And every time he blinked, there were different schools, different classmates – and he stopped making friends because, the moment he blinked, they'd be gone as well. He'd blink, and the sun would disappear into the night.


	35. painting (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _35: painting_

Darkness is an empty hole that needs to be filled, but also the canvas that's been painted over and underneath is a gorgeous painting, if only someone can peel the black off without ruining what lies underneath. He's a painter and a handyman as well. He makes his own holes and fills them, paints his own pictures and then covers them. It's an endlessly perpetuating cycle and there's always holes, and always imperfect paintings painted over, because there's something wrong or incomplete about the lens through which he sees the world. It's imperfect, his rendering: littered with holes and wrong.


	36. breathing flames (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _36: breathing flames_

Fire needed air to breath, air to alight, air to spread. Fire couldn't take root inside a vacuum, and didn't last for very long at all inside a coffin. After all, the funeral pyre went out after the body was ash and bone – and it never burned long enough to melt or fry the bones. Instead, the ashes were put inside the urn and there wouldn't be ashes if the fire could endlessly burn. But it wasn't just air, otherwise the entire world would be a thick sandwich of flames. It was fuel as well: kindling that hugged flames close.


	37. two's a pair (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _37: two's a pair_

Light can be a flickering candle lit in the gloom or a flashbang: a needle prick or a gaping sword wound. And he can do both of those, or at times none of those. Sometimes the light can leave bleeding spots in the darkness and sometimes it cannot. They trade on and off, for first and second place, and it's only when they go hand in hand instead of opposing each other that they manage to surge past the rest. And the handshake fills their hearts and souls but also causes their palms to blister. They push each other further.


	38. imaging (Izumi)

**natural**  
 _38: imaging_

She is not a mirror who's so carefully drawn it's altogether false, but an abstract piece of art: colours splashed in a way that looks different to every eye, every beholder. She's not the photogenic model that can be captured perfectly in the first photo and there's nothing deeper – she's too complex for that, always shifting, always moving, and an indistinct blur on the screen. She's too impatient for glossy portraits that won't paint her true face. She's too fast for picture to catch her in the perfect pose. Instead, it's the camcorder following her that'll capture her the best.


	39. firestarter (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _39: firestarter_

He's the one holding the matches so that means he needs to be the one to strike them too: feel out the kindling and set them alight and make sure the marching soldiers behind him aren't swept up in its blaze as well. He's the one who needs to make sure he fires flaming arrows at the enemies without frying the friends in between. Needs to make sure he cooks the meat well done without turning it into charcoal, warms the water without burning it, doesn't use up all the air, all the fuel, all the cover, all their lives…


	40. ice-keeper (Tomoki)

**natural**  
 _40: ice-keeper_

Ice is hate that sits and stews, but it's also the fragile memories locked away in a glass prison while the flames of the world try and burn them. Ice is misunderstanding and understanding: slippery slopes but also firm beliefs. Ice is the eyes that see the reflection of kindness when it is nothing but a reflection, until the fire burns that mirror ice into a puddle and the truth is relieved. Ice is what knows to hold firm, knows which memories to protect, what hate to let go. Ice is the differential prison who knows when to open doors.


	41. slumber (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _41: slumber_

Darkness is the slumber that protects him, restarts him, coaxes him towards the right light, the truth. Darkness is the cloth that douses the demi-flame that leads him astray in the swamp, that lights a lantern for him to make it through this treacherous bog back to the path he'd been on. Darkness is the forgiving embrace when his eyes and bleeding body stings, when the truth hurts or his heart screams because it's so pulled, so strained. Darkness is the rest when he can't keep going anymore, without worrying he'll be gutted in his sleep and fried over flame.


	42. static (Junpei)

**natural**  
 _42: static_

Static was the shock that made him pause and double-take, that made him act and then think before it was too late to change things or take them back. It was the warning that came after warning shots, the silence that came after the olive branch that went out, the seed of fear that blossomed when his fist met a chest far more powerful than he. It was also that strange psychic connection that told him words were truth and words were lies, that told him his friends were that way, nearby, and the path was just beyond them too.


	43. conditional (Kouji)

**natural**  
 _43: conditional_

Light is many things: hate and love as well, but conditional. Light can't reach every corner of the globe, every corner of a person's soul. It can't reach into the very depths of the earth if there's no path for it to follow. Light can't hate the world, nor love the world. The world is too big; light can't even see the world. But light picks its precious things, its most ugly things. It prioritises. It makes a list. It trades on and off, like the sun and moon, day and night. And it saves the best, what it can.


	44. unconditional (Kouichi)

**natural**  
 _44: unconditional_

Darkness was love and hate as well, but darkness could touch all light can touch and more. It was all reaching, ever seeing – but it was blind. It could not see at all. It loved everyone. Hated everyone. There was no difference between one person and another, or a person and a flower, or a person and a book. They all felt the same. They all existed in this world the same as any other existence, and deserved the same respect, the same love, the same hate, the same ownership for the world's toils and troubles and love and hate.


	45. hope and despair (Takuya)

**natural**  
 _45: hope and despair_

Hope is a fire too. Despair is a fire too. They both burn, but hope lights the flame under a stove, under a hot air balloon, inside someone's heart. Despair on the other hand is a destructive flame, that tears through everything and leaves burnt flesh and ash in its wake. They can burn together: one big fire that rages out of control and that no amount of water in the world will douse. Or they can clash: white flames and black flames like the magic battle of the ages, but neither's magic. Hope and despair… Anyone can feel them.


End file.
